In recent years, on-demand printing of user designs and images onto garments and other items has gained popularity. Typically, such on-demand printing allows a user to add artwork or designs to an already manufactured item such as a t-shirt, sweatshirt, shoe, bag, and the like. Printing these user-generated designs and graphics on finished garments and other objects is typically limited to small, pre-defined areas of the product, in part because the artwork cannot traverse seams. Alternatively, even if the artwork can traverse seams of the finished item, the inks cannot penetrate the seams and wrinkles of the pre-manufactured products. Therefore, the printing on these pre-manufactured blanks is either limited to a small area, or is interrupted by highly visible seam lines and wrinkles breaking up the artwork.
In practice, providers of such printing services purchase desired items from manufacturers and utilize printing machinery and techniques (e.g., inkjet printing) to print user submitted art onto the items. The pre-manufactured nature of such items limits the ability to print art to seamless, or otherwise generally planar, surface areas because seams and other non-planar areas and edges can cause damage to the printing machinery. Accordingly, users have previously been limited in their ability to customize and design desired items. For example, due to these constraints, a user may not be able to create a t-shirt having a design that wraps around the body, or over the shoulders and sleeves, of the shirt.
In addition, because current web-based visualization techniques for visualizing placement of user-generated art on products (e.g., “configurators”) are photographs or illustrations of pre-manufactured products and are without awareness of the manufacturing files for the given product, including the products seams or joined edges, product visualization methods have similarly been limited to displaying user-selected images on individual surfaces of the item. For example, a user wishing to place an image extending from a body of a shirt to its sleeve may not be able to visualize the appearance and distortion of such a placement on the product's three-dimensional surface. That is, it was previously not possible to visualize the appearance of the placement of a design on multiple surfaces of an item due to the inability of design tools to properly render the item as a 3D model, from 2D manufacturing files, while displaying the proper distortion characteristics. Likewise, current visualization software does not account for the non-visible seams, such that the artwork traversing seams is programmatically bled into the joining seams, whereby the artwork will appear seamlessly on both the 3d model and the finished, manufactured product.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system to generate three-dimensional (3D) models of desired objects to allow a user to visualize the appearance of such artwork and designs on the desired objects prior to manufacturing thereof.